Night Fall by Joan Aiken #WitchWeek2024

It’s Witch Week, hosted by Chris of Calmgrove and Lizzie Ross to honor Diana Wynne Jones’ Witch Week, and this year they are celebrating the work of Joan Aiken. Several of my favorites have been featured by some talented bloggers but the week would not be complete without a lesser-known but one of my favorites: Night Fall, a suspenseful novella set in London and Cornwall.

English-born Meg was just nine when her mother and stepfather, Hollywood movie stars, were killed in a car crash. She was shipped across the Atlantic to an emotionally withdrawn father she barely remembered, with no allowance made for her devastating loss at home or school. Thank goodness for the two children next door, George and Polly, and Hodge, the cat sent to Meg by her mother’s sister (inconveniently teaching in Beirut). Meg learns to adapt to her new life in London by day but her nights are haunted by a recurring nightmare:

In fact, it wasn’t until I’d been having it for several years that I began to remember dim fragments of it when I woke up. Each time it came back, which varied from periods of three to six months, seldom more, seldom less – the familiar horror would grip me and then in my sleep, I would remember and wait helplessly for it to take its usual course and lead to its awful climax. Between its visitation it faded from my mind like steam from a mirror, but then I would wake in the morning, rigid with terror, my heart banging, my mouth dry from a silent scream, knowing I’d had the dream again, but with nearly all traces of memory gone.

Meg is too ashamed of the dream to tell anyone, no matter how upsetting it is. Instead, she puts her energy into art and as she grows up, she becomes a talented portraitist.

At 19, she is reunited with next-door George, now a handsome and confident stockbroker. He sweeps her off her feet, which is nice for Meg, starved of affection since losing her mother. But George is controlling and Meg’s nightmares return. Finally, she confides in her aunt Venetia and describes how she sees a face in her dream coming toward her out of the darkness and feels she is falling off a cliff. To Meg’s surprise, her aunt recalls that Meg did once have a cliff accident, around the time when her parents separated, when Meg’s mother had fled with her to Penleggan in Cornwall. Venetia unearths a postcard from the inn they stayed at and suggests Meg go to Cornwall:

“All right, honey – take it easy now.” Venetia patted my shoulder, and I realized I was gripping the arm of my chair. “I’ll tell you what: why don’t you go down there, to Penleggan, and reenact the crime, or whatever they call it?”

“Chuck myself over the cliff?”

“No, but wander around and look at the place. Seeing it again – together with some peace and quiet and sea air – might undo whatever knot has got knotted up inside you.”

When Meg arrives with her cat, her lack of memory about the cliff accident turns out not to be the only mystery in Penleggan. Not everyone appreciates her questions and curiosity about the past but Meg is slow to realize she is in danger . . .

I was 11 when Night Fall was published in the US. Pre-Internet we learned about books from The New York Times Book Review, which did a big children’s issue twice a year, back in the day. I very specifically remember going to the library with a scrap of newsprint and purchasing a postcard to put it on reserve, then waiting impatiently for the book to arrive (putting books on hold is infinitely easier now). It was very different from the Wolves series I had reread frequently (and shorter, just 116 pages) and would be categorized as Young Adult now (this cover below makes it look like an adult Gothic) but although it was scary, I didn’t think it was too old for me (because of its genre, however, it lacks the humor Aiken is known for).

Meg is practically an orphan, for all the good her father is to her, which captured my imagination, and Aiken’s vivid evocation of the Penleggan’s dramatic cliffs and rocks made me want to visit Cornwall. The characters in Penleggan are also memorable – the landlord of The Trevelyan Arms, longing to leave town; the diminutive mailman (reading Meg’s mail: Venetia should have known better than to send a postcard), and a handsome young man who yearns to bring new industry to town. He warns Meg:

“It didn’t occur to you . . . That there may be someone in Penleggan who isn’t keen on your coming back here and trying to remember what you saw fourteen years ago?”

Cathy of 746 Books and Bookish Beck are co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long blogger challenge celebrating the art of the short book, and I recommend this one, which has stayed with me for many years.  

Title: Night Fall
Author: Joan Aiken
Publication: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, hardcover, originally published in 1969
Genre: YA suspense
Source: Personal copy (although it looks like this belongs to my school library; for once I think one of my siblings must be to blame)